Checksum Arcanius

A couple of weeks ago, I Ebayed an OEM GPS module for $25, including shipping. Then about a week ago, I picked up a Mighty Mouse II from Tri-M Systems. Today, I finally got around to hooking them up. Using a breadbaord, a 5-volt regulator, a 6-volt power supply, a wire wrapper, and a good supply of wirewrap and other wires, I finally hooked it all up today. The result: incoming NMEA data words at 4800 Baud!

I quickly found some free (as in beer) software to help me make sense out of it. VisualGPS showed up in Google, and is working well. See a screenshot below.

This is all in preperation for an entry to the Seattle Robotics Society‘s Robo-Magellan.

Here are some pictures of the setup:
The Setup
The Breadboard
The GPS receiver – look at the pretty wirewrapping!
The Mighty Mouse II Active Antenna (first location)
The MMII (second location)
The result in Visual GPS

I just “beat” Half-Life 2, if thats what you can call finishing a game with an ending like this. It was one heckuv a ride, but I think the whole Citidel thing was way too repetitive and way too short. One omnipotent weapon, and a fast-forward to the top of the place didn’t really make for a challenging or climatic end. I’ll be the first to say that the end to the original Half-Life was probably too challenging (I never really completed that one on the level). Nevertheless, there’s never any real time decision making going on towards the end. Its just right-click left-click right-click left-click. And in the end, it feels like they could have raised the whole game to another power and really had a spetacular ending. So in the end it was a somewhat disappointing finale to an otherwise incredible game.

Don’t get me wrong – the game really was incredible. It’s hard to forget the first descent into the Citadel, the first time bringing down a dropship, or the vehicular rides through expansive outdoor landscapes. Indeed, this is where HL2 really shines – it’s engine, source. That a masterful, though imperfect game was put on top is a bonus, for sure. How incredible the engine really is struck me again when, a couple of days ago, I saw a combine soldier swinging back and forth pinned to the ceiling by a crossbow dart. All rendered real time, perfectly.

If I could return Doom 3 to buy another copy of HL2, I probably would, just because its that good. And because D3 sucked so much. Oh well.

Recent events

85/100 on Circuits test… Not exactly what I would have hoped for, but better than I was expecting after I screwed up the op-amps. I’ve gotta kick it into a higher gear here soon, if I want to pull out of the mid-B rut that I’ve gotten myself into in the class.

Started building an ROV with Dan Marsh and the TRC. For more, see Dan’s post about it.

Collecting parts for a future SRS Robo-Magellan entry. Recently picked up a GPS reciever module (thanks to Dan for the tip). The module requires an active antenna, so I went looking for a good one, and settled on the Mighty Mouse II, a high gain, low power active antenna that rocks my socks. An especially big shout out to Tri-M Systems for working with me to help get the unit from Canada to the TRC quickly and efficiently. Go buy their stuff, yo!

Saw Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy twice in two days. Once was plenty, but a combination of circumstance and commitment led me to watching it a second time. Suffice it to say that it’s not one of those movies that gets better the second time through. I didn’t hate it the first time, though, and the second time, though not anywhere near wonderful, was not bad, and the company (Shai and Beth) was good too.

Installed a 9-in-4 card reader in my desktop computer. The unit was recieved from Dan along with a wired USB optical mouse in exchange for a Microsoft Wireless Intellimouse Explorer that wasn’t well-suited for gaming due to miniscule but noticable start-up lag times, and wasn’t well suited for a laptop due to its battery requirements. I think the trade was mutually beneficial. Everyone shoudl trade more, its good for everyone involved (but if I went too much further down this line of thought, I’d have to add this to the political category as well).

Began helping Erik set up his new dedicated server. Debian Linux is a good distro. It should go back to #1, yo. Silverfir.net, and perhaps TitanRobotics.net, will host some of their websites on the new server as well. The server is from ServerPronto, and its a good price for a dedicated server with the specs it boasts. We’ll see how it holds up once Erik’s proxy servers get going.

Played Ultimate Frisbee at the UW’s intramural field 1 on Friday with the team of Bobby, Jake, Joe, and others. We lost by a point to an evenly matched team, which seems to be the story of my ultimate life. It was good fun, however. Afterwards, we hung out at the UW until seeing Hitchhiker’s for the first time.

Went to a doctor Thursday morning. I have low blood pressure. Nothing too serious, though, apparently. I can eat more salt. Is this a good thing?

Talked to Scott about the upcoming bike trip.

There is a very nifty little utility for *nix that I started using again recently. So that I don’t have to relearn it each time, I thought I would write about it. That way, I’ll be more likely to remember, and if I forget, I’ll have myself a handy little reference here at Checksum Arcanius. A wonderful little side effect of all of this is that you get to learn about GNU Screen.

GNU screen is a great utility for those of us whose entire *nix existance is via SSH. Lets say you have a program that you want to persist between sessions of SSH, but its not a daemon and you want full access to the user interface, so detaching it via the & command line operator isn’t a good solution. What do you do? You use Screen. I have a program that fits this description exactly. Naim, an ncurses-based AIM and ICQ client. After installing, to start a Screen session, simply type “screen”. You will be presented with a new command prompt, and apparently nothing changed. But in reality, now you are in screen, and your life just got better. Now start the program you want to persist between SSH sessions. For me, I type “naim”, and Naim loads. I chat a little here and there, then I decide its time to change computers, or reboot, or whatever. But I want to stay online. So I hit “Ctrl-a” (signalling a command to Screen) then “d” for detach. I go back to the original command line. I then exit, or do whatever else I want. Fast forward to my next log in. I SSH back into the machine, and I want to resume where I left off. So I type “screen -r”, and voila, Naim – pristine and just as it was before – appears before my eyes. No one even has to know I was gone. How wonderful is that? It is even possible to have multiple screens running, and switch between them, but I’m not that advanced yet. But hopefully this little tidbit hasa whetted your appitite to try out the wonderful little utility known as Screen.

Yesterday, Trillian stopped working for me. It would start up, then immediately crash. I was able to temporarily resolve the problem by disabling the auto-connect feature (while the friendly Windows “This Program Is Now Crashing” window was up, Trillian still responded to commands). This stopped the program from crash. However, it was no way for a program that was supposed to make my life easier to behave. And, since Ceurellian Studios sold us subscribers out and didn’t give a discount for Trillian 3, I had decided that my next move would be to Gaim.

I had tried Gaim on several months earlier, and while it worked fine, I found the user interface extremely unrefined. My Trillian skin of choice, Beacon2, is very small, with very little overhead, with the online portion of my large contact list usually fitting entirely on one screen. In Gaim, only perhaps 15 contacts fit on a single page, and the concessions to allow a tabbed interface add so much bulk to windows that there is little room left over for conversation. I found all of this extremely displeasing. However, it had worked, so yesterday, I decided it was worth a larger investment of my time. And there was always the possibility that I would find a skin that fitted my fancy.

However, it was not to be. I installed the latest version of Gaim, but I have yet to see it run. In fact, when I try to run it, apparently nothing happens. No error message; no window of any sort, in fact. A small amount of Googling led to a few leads, but all were dead ends. In short, I have no idea what is going on, and no idea what to do to begin to find a fix.

Any help would be appreciated.

Today, my American Express Blue card arrived. Say bye-bye to checks at Costco, and hello to gas at Costco. Woo-hoo!

So, it has this special chip on it, which supposedly makes it special. Phishaw! I bet that if I posted my number up here, it’d be used internationally in moments!

In other news, Firefox has turned 50! (via Bernie)

In non-news, I sure poured it on in this comment on Bobby’s Blog. Everyone who knows him should bug him until he posts again.

Well, during my conniptions with Google, I discovered an interesting website – Blogshares. It appears to be an online trading site for shares in blogs. I’m not sure why someone would go to the trouble… but whatever. Unto each their own. Apparently, Checksum Arcanius is worth a whopping B$2,630.67!